worldsofsdnfandomcom-20200214-history
Sir Charles-class Dreadnought
The Sir Charles-class Dreadnought, sometimes simply called His Ship, is a class of armed warship that is the heaviest mainstay of the RIS navy. With twenty-four ships in servicethey exist in numbers enough to be where they are needed and to respond to external threats. At they time they were laid down this class represented the peak of the Republic's shipbuilding though other ships in this size range had been laid down. All have been upgraded once over their lifespan, though for a short while there were plans to scrap them and simply build a new class of ships. Characteristics All information listed here is based on information gained at the testing and based on simulations and real combat data. Any inaccuracies can be blamed on intentional misinformation from the government. Mass and Size The Sir Charles-class is a cylinder a kilometer in length with a diameter at its widest point of three-hundred meters tappering to two-hundred and fifty meters at each end. Due in part to a super dense hull and a high density fuel as well as multiple redundant parts the ship masses at 600 million metric tons. This weight places at near the highest end for commonly seen combatants. Power Plant & Fuel The Sir Charles-class is powered by twenty-five matter/anti-matter (A/AM) reactors located within the center of the ship and protected by an armored shell. Each reactor is thirty meters in diameter and twenty-five meteres in length. Each is rated to burn sustain a reaction at a combined total of two-hundred grams of deuterium and anti-deuterium per second. Such a reaction theoretically produces 1.8E16J of energy, but in reality only 80% of that energy is produced and captured. This incredible level of efficiency is done in part by using the heat to induce fusion as well as by using special neutron absorbing sheets to allow the normally wasted particles to be captured. This effieciency has since been improved on for the newest ships in the fleet, but the cost of a retrofit precludes the new reactors being mounted aboard new ships. Fuel is stored in twenty-six seperate storage tanks thirteen hold matter and the other thirteen anti-matter. Each tank has a volume of 29,400m^3. They all store the fuel by means of compressing it in a crushing field of artaficial gravity that allows for fuel to be stored at five-hundred kilograms per cubic meter. Sublight Engines and Manuevering The Sir Charles-class is accellerated by a pair of engine blocks, one at each end of the ship, comprised of one larger engine and a ring of eight engines of half that size. These engines are all of the VASIMR type. Each engine cluster is rated to draw the full output of three reactor clusters or 4.32e16W. The highest rated acceleration of the ship is 125,000m/s^2 and can only be acheived by feeding the engines at maximum rate and maintaining a large amount of power to the artaficial gravity to maintain a steady 0.75g's as felt by the crew. It should be noted that the ship only carries enough propelent to preform such a burn for ten seconds and doing so would mean that all manuevering thrust would come from gas normally used to cool the ships weapons systems. Maneuvering at full thrust from the eighty main, and two-hundred and fifty-six secondary thrusters the ship can turn end to end in a second though such capability is only needed to counteract firing the lasers at full power in a none standard pattern, or if immediate escape is desired and an engine cluster is damaged. Should all powered systems fail the ship is still rated to withstand 15g's of acceleration or pressure. Hyperspace Engines The Sir Charles-class, like all ships in the RIS fleet that are hyperspace capable, use a classified system to make the jump from normal to hyperspace. The initial jump seems to take a lot of power, but once going faster than light normal mass is resumed. To save power the speeds accelerated to rarely exceed two-thousand times the speed of light, but could potentially be much faster if one ignores the issues this causes with the ships faster than light sensors. Sensors The Sir Charles-class of vessels has two main sensor towers mounted at the center of the ship on towers one-hundred meters tall. Half way between them and the engines in each dirrect another group of four equally spaced towers rise fifty meters over the ships main hull. The main towers have many sensors including radar, LIDAR, visual detection, ECM, ECCM, and a specialized faster than light sensor suite (the workings of which are classified at this time) all are run by a powerful strategic computer. The smaller towers have less powerful versions of all systems. Lastly each weapons battery has a very small radar, LIDAR, and infarred dettection suite. These systems are all linked to the central computer by an faster than light transmission system thus far only confirmed to be used by the RIS. Weapons The Sir Charles-class is a heavily armed ship armed with many batteries of high powered lasers. These lasers are arranged into primary and secondary batteries. There are sixty-four main batteries of four lasers each. These main batteries are arranged into eight evenly spaced bands of eight evenly spaced batteries. Each battery is rated at a maximum output of 200 MT/s (~8.4e+17 W) - the per laser rating is ~50MT/s (~2.1e+17 W) rated to fire for five minutes though in testing they can fire for twenty minutes though efficiency drops sharply from a peak of 60% after the rated period and the weapon rapidly degrades from there. Like the larger Expansion-class vessels these batteries are powered by capacitors that take around an hour to recharge. The secondary batteries number two-hundred and fifty-six in total and each battery numbers light lasers. These bands are arranged into sixteen bands with sixteen evenly spaced batteries per band, each main band of batteries is flanked by a secondary battery. The secondardy batteries are rated at 1KT/s (~4.2e+12 W) - the per laser rating is 0.25KT/s (~1.05e+12 W) - these batteries are rated to fire for ten minutes though in testing they can fire for nearly an hour. As with the main batteries they opperate at 60% efficiency and drop down to being worthless after exceeding the peak rate of fire. Defenses The Sir Charles-class has a many layed system of defenses starting with the passive ECM and ECCM systems, then into active ECM and ECCM systems, next are the energy fields, and last is the ships armored hull. ECM and ECCM These systems include things such as the stealth coating on the ships hull, heatsinks, anti-spoofing systems, radar chirping, frequency hoping, sidelobe blanking, polarization, radar homing, and many other systems not the least of which is a pair of AI hacking brains that attempt to exploit exposed networks in other vessels while keeping the ship itself safe. Energy Fields Not yet fully declassified we know little about how the so called energy fields work except that they are a static field of energy and exotic particles that form a seemless bubble out to ten meters from the ships hull. A series of many hundreds of well anchored projectors are layered near the center of the ship and they, along with large heatsinks, are anchored along the ship's energy spine. The military has stated they have a maximum energy dispersal rate of 20.6MT/s (~8.64e16W) this is assumed to be total not per projector. They also state that the system has a breaking point of 4MT (~1.67e16J) for a single attack in one shield sector. The shielding system is known to be energy consuming when at full power and is thought to run at lower power much of the time. It is also known to be a so called double blind system that needs to open to be fired or seen through, it is belived that a section can be opened and closed many times faster than a person can blink. Hull The hull is protected by a combination of super dense hull plating layered over explosive reactive panels against another dense plate that rests against a layer of gel. Each layer when taken as a whole is known to be five meters thick. The entire armor system comprises five such layers and the upper most layer of each is coated in layer of gel designed to create laser disrupting smoke. The outer layer on a undamaged ship also has a stealth coating designed to absorb radar and LIDAR.